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Inside the IDW layoffs and "reset": How a company went from making "a shit-ton of money" to worrying about bankruptcy

Current and former IDW employes, including the new CEO himself, help us assemble a picture of what is happening at IDW Publishing and IDW Entertainment

IDW Publishing
Image credit: IDW Media Holdings

As the dust continues to settle on the massive and sudden wave of layoffs that struck IDW Media Holdings (and its subsidiaries IDW Publishing and IDW Entertainment) on April 27 – a slate of dismissals that saw approximately 39% of the company’s workforce let go over the course of a single day – the facts are still slowly becoming clear about what happened. Even as IDW issued a press release on May 3 (its first public statement since the upheaval a week earlier) announcing what the company had previously dubbed a “reset” for the publishing division under a new leadership of both new hires and remaining staff, many of those dismissed from the company are still struggling to make sense of the how and why of their abrupt termination.

Although IDW’s former employees are almost universally reticent to speak openly and on the record (lest their comments harm prospects with future employers), Popverse has been able to speak with several of the laid-off IDW employees across multiple divisions, who together helped assemble a fuller portrait of one of the more jarring single days in recent comic industry news.

At the same time, Popverse has been speaking to current IDW staff about the situation, including senior figures within the company including the newly-hired CEO Davidi Jonas (whose family owns a majority percentage of the company).

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